Honoring L.A.’s ‘Secret’ Art Pioneer : Art: On the eve of receiving one of the art world’s most prestigious awards, Hans Burkhardt looks back at decades of social conscience.

Los Angeles painter Hans Burkhardt is a classic American-immigrant success story. Born in Basel, Switzerland, orphaned at 6, he had a childhood that makes “Oliver Twist” sound like a picnic. Always hungry in a nasty city orphanage, he worked at menial jobs from dawn to dusk earning miserly wages he never received.

Wednesday he will be honored in New York with the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters’ Jimmy Ernst Award. Presented annually since 1990 to an artist for lifetime achievement, the award comes with a $5,000 honorarium and is the art sphere equivalent of an Oscar, Tony or Emmy. (Previous recipients were Milton Resnick and Peter Agostini.) Other California honorees this year include artists Peter Voulkos and Fred Dalkey.

When some L.A. art people heard the news their response was something like, “Oh, isn’t that nice. Now where does he live? Here? Funny, I always thought he was a New York artist.” Understandable error. Burkhardt has been around so long that among younger artniks, his status hovers somewhere between half-remembered and half-forgotten. Just another symptom of the city’s chronic state of historical amnesia.

In fact, the 87-year-old Burkhardt lives with his wife, Thordis, in one of those quaint culs-de-sac in the hills off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. He built his warm, beautifully crafted house with his own hands. Walls are lined with prints by everyone from Picasso to his old friend Mark Tobey. He retains the sparkling blue eyes and stocky, muscular body of his youth, drives his ancient Jeep, stretches his own canvases and, at least six times a day, climbs the 60 brick steps that lead to the house. He possesses some of George Burns’ elfin charm but without the wisecracks.

“It’s just wonderful to be still living to get this award. It’s a big surprise,” he admits in a voice that hints of the lilt of Swiss German.

He has legitimate reason to see himself as having played a key role in bringing classic New York Abstract Expressionism to Los Angeles. In 1924, fed up with the poverty and endless low-level work he endured in Switzerland, he emigrated to New York. There, inklings of an art career blossomed into passion when he saw the work of Arshile Gorky.

“At first I couldn’t believe that in the U.S. you have a decent meal every day. Then I met Gorky and saw abstract art for the first time. I knew this was what I had looked for all my life. He helped me to believe in myself, in my own vision.”

Graduating from Gorky’s student to colleague and patron, Burkhardt shared the seminal abstract artist’s spotless studio for almost a decade.

“He was broke and depressed so I found him food and money,” Burkhardt said. “I gave him $20 and he gave me a painting. He wanted to give me more but I refused. I never took advantage of him. De Kooning and I both learned from Gorky. If I’d stayed in New York, I’d be like De Kooning. We are the last two left but he’s sick. I’m lucky to be so healthy.”

In 1947, Gorky, suffering the aftereffects of an auto accident and depressed over work destroyed in two studio fires, hung himself. By then, Burkhardt had moved to Los Angeles, infuriated when he lost what little he had in a divorce action with his first wife. “Afterward, I hung the clerk of the Domestic Relations Court in a painting,” he said. “It was my first protest painting.”

If there is a reason Burkhardt is being honored--aside from his distinguished career and having outlived the competition--it is certainly because he is currently viewed as a precursor of recent socially conscious art.

Revived interest in Burkhardt is reflected in recent articles in Art News and Artspace magazines. Both emphasize the role of his aesthetic conscience. There is little resemblance between Burkhardt’s sensibility and that of, say, Barbara Kruger, but an artist like the German Anselm Kiefer could find ancestry in the L.A. painter’s spirit.

Burkhardt has protested social injustice through his art since the Spanish Civil War. A catalogue raisonne of his “war” paintings tracks his angry despair at man’s inhumanity from World War II through Vietnam. His series on the Desert Storm war is currently seen at the Jack Rutberg Gallery. Burkhardt is already at work on compositions about the L.A. riots. He pointed to an homage to Martin Luther King Jr. after the assassination.

“Maybe if Dr. King had lived, these riots wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “But I don’t just do protest paintings. When things are happy, I do happy paintings. I love to go to the High Sierras and look at the bees and butterflies. I feel closest to God up there. But the best and worst things seem to come at the same time. When I moved here to the canyon, it was like Eden but then the smog came and I painted that. I started a furniture-finishing business out here and painted props for MGM.”

In 1945 he participated in a notorious studio strike that inspired him to paint “Studio Scab--Ronald Reagan.” The same year he won the County Museum’s annual juried show prize for the painting “One Way Road,” which the museum then inexplicably refused to show.

“The County Museum has ignored me for 40 years. Here, look at this flag painting I’m doing. It’s called ‘The County Mausoleum,’ ” he chuckles. “But it’s all right. After (winning the prize), I discovered I could go paint in Mexico on the G.I. Bill because I’d been in the Army a short time. I love this country. Going to Mexico was the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s a beautiful culture where life and death live close together and people aren’t afraid of it.”

If Burkhardt has failed to get his due in Lotusland, it is certainly not because he lacks historical importance. Along with Helen Lundeberg he is the last survivor of the pioneer generation that included such old friends as Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Lorser Feitelson and Knud Merrild. He remembers Los Angeles at epochs when its leading artists were Millard Sheets, then Rico Lebrun. It may be that Burkhardt, like his old neighbor Ed Kienholz, ran afoul of Los Angeles’ endemic allergic reaction to art that touches life’s tragic dimension. Now that the riots have given the town a chance to shake off its delusions of an eternally happy adolescent Valhalla, that may be changing.

Burkhardt says: “I’m a simple person. I just paint as life comes to me. I don’t read much or go to the movies. I like good classical music, but I just paint. I think all art is good if it’s well-made. Look at this.” He points to an assemblage he concocted of old paint tubes. “I came into the studio one day and the rats were eating this paint. It’s poison, but it just went right through them and they survived. If we don’t stop poisoning the planet there’ll be nothing left, but the rats.”

And possibly Hans Burkhardt, who seems able to survive anything.